


A voice through the Wilderness.

by mothdads



Series: Two Hundred and Ten Years Past [1]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: (or not fully canon compliant anyway), Established Relationship, Light Angst, M/M, Not Canon Compliant
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-04
Updated: 2017-10-04
Packaged: 2019-01-08 23:57:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12264711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mothdads/pseuds/mothdads
Summary: After the revelation of entering the Institution for the first time, Elliott reflects on his life.What the hell is he going to do now? The immediate answer is booze, chems, and extremely poor decisions.





	A voice through the Wilderness.

**Author's Note:**

> After the first encounter with the Institute, I was so frustrated with the available dialogue and responses, that my Sole Survivor ended up deviating quite a bit from the general storyline. 
> 
> I hope y'all enjoy it.

Elliott could hear their voices in the background now. He didn’t have much time. Only her face was visible now, under the mound of dirt. Her body wouldn’t be well preserved with nothing to protect her from the elements, but perhaps that was good. It would be cruel to box her up again, after 200 years in that great glass prison. No, better that the earth retake her body. Where she was buried there would be a little spot, alone in the wasteland, that would be clean of radiation. 

He would plant flowers there, he thought, when he next came to visit. Maybe even a tree. Something that would flower, and spread, and make a little corner of tainted heaven here in his broken hell. 

“General!” He heard Preston call. He sounded worried. Elliott supposed he had given him reason to worry. To someone who didn’t understand, this must have looked a little odd.

He didn’t have to glance up to tell that they would be on him in seconds. He leant in, very close now. 

“Sweet dreams, honey.” He said, and kissed her for what would be the last time. Then he stood up, ignoring the ache in his hip, and picked up the shovel, scooping up the last heap of earth, and overturned it above the grave, the dirt filling the last hole in her earthen casket. He would be the last person to ever see that face, and it was a shame. Never before had he seen a face that held such love. He knew he would not again. Shaun would never inherit that compassion now, the time had passed where any of the three of them could have made that possible. 

He pulled the revolver from his pocket, reloaded it, and held it up, against his head. Then he sighed, and put it down again. 

“Guess you can have this too.” He said wistfully. “I’m going to miss this gun, you know. Has a silencer and everything. Makes you a pretty lucky gal.” 

Then they were upon him. He felt a gun against his back. 

He relaxed, chuckled slightly to himself. “I know you’re not going to shoot me, John. You’ll have to try harder than that to spook me.” 

“You’re-you’re messed up in the head.” He can hear Hancock say, and he can hear the panic in his voice. “This was fucked up and wrong and you know it!”

“Aww, cut a guy some slack. I had to tell her about what her son has been up to these past years. It’d be cruel to keep her in the dark about everything.” He reasoned, rearranging the revolver atop the grave. It just wasn’t quite in the middle. She wouldn’t have liked that. 

“But sir, surely you must realise that she’s dead!”

He hadn’t realised Codsworth was with them. If anything, he sounded more distressed than either of the others.

“Of course I do, Codsworth. I just needed to see her- and to see her off properly. Celebrate her like I should have when she was alive.” He nodded, reminiscing. He couldn’t help but think back to her 21st Birthday. Watching her dance from across the room, still confined to a chair, miserable after the collision that had ruined his debuting career in baseball. She deserved someone that could have danced with her, but she didn’t mind that he couldn’t. When she had seen him sat there, miserable, she had stayed with him for five whole dances, just talking. He hadn’t made very good conversation. 

“Sir, you were a model husband.” Codsworth patted him on the back with his teapot hand. “Mum couldn’t have asked for more.” 

“Oh but she could. She could have had anything she wanted, and she would have deserved it. She deserved to grow old, and be surrounded by people who loved her. She deserved to raise that boy, and she would have done a fine job with him. Better than I have.” 

“Oh sir!” Codsworth exclaimed despairingly. It was surprising, the sheer emotion this robot was able to feel. Shaun was wrong about all of them. They felt as much as he did. 

“I just wanted to dance with her, one last time.” Elliott admitted sombrely. “I don’t think she would have minded. You know how she loved to dance.”

Codsworth didn’t say anything. None of them said anything. The conversation had lost Hancock and Preston a long while back now.

Elliott groaned, before laying down in the dirt next to Nora. It had been a long few days. He hadn’t slept since friday. He didn’t know what day it was now, but he suspected that it was at least sunday. 

The night sky was lightening now, he could just see rays of light poking out over the old overpass. A new day for the commonwealth. A new day for him. He was listless now. His duty, such as it was, lay in the earth next to him. His old life had been laid down to rest. He had taken what revenge he could from Kellogg, and it had left him empty, with the knowledge that he could not hate a man whose life was led so close to his own.

Shaun would never forgive Kellogg, of course, and that was the one thing that tied father and son together; it was a sign that deep down he regretted not having the life that Elliott and Nora had wanted for him. But it was also a sign of the life that he had led- Shaun had never learnt to be afraid of himself, so he could not pity others, he would never empathise. Elliott wished above all that his son had had a chance to hurt people, and to regret it. To learn to care about people properly. The institute would be a different place then, though that did not mean better. And perhaps what had happened would ultimately be for the best? As fraught and cruel as the institute was, it truly was humanity’s greatest hope. That however, did not mean that Elliott would ever feel good about what had happened. That was more than could be asked. 

He realised his eyes were closed. He did not remember closing them, he had been too wrapped up in thought. He opened them, to see his erstwhile band of companions sitting around him. They seemed to be paying their respects. He was glad: they each would have loved her, if only they could have met her. Codsworth of course, had. He knew. The woman she was had not been sullied by time. Life had not managed to break her spirit one bit, even as it chomped at his arm, making him more gnarled and sullied as the days went by. But in her way, she was lucky. She did not have to endure the anguish of living in this horrible now, and that at least, he would not change. He fancied that he was protecting her. She looked down from above.

In everyone else’s minds this seemed to be a very melancholy moment. Elliott was still strung out enough on old booze and mentats that it didn’t bother him. He was calm as he watched the purple sky bruise over the horizon. They had been there a long while. 

Feeling his aching bones protest he sat up, scooching over to where Hancock sat. 

“You still want to shoot me?” 

“Hey, it was a precaution. You were strung out of your mind back at sanctuary. I’ve spent enough time off my tits on chems to know the drill.” His voice retained its permanent cheeky quality, but it rang out thin. 

“MMhhm.” Elliott agreed, voice fading against the harsh light. 

“Y’know, I’m… sorry. About all of this. Your wife, and the kid, and… having to live here. With the rest of us ghouls and savages. It must be so strange, to see the place you lived and none of the people you knew in it. We must look like freaks.”

Elliott considered. “It was a hard blow to take, first off, but in some ways, it makes it easier. A new start, no neighbours to offer condolences and watch you through the curtains. And the people aren’t so different. I saw war before. I know what it reduced people to. Your whole generation seem to weather it much easier, after all, you’re used to it. Dunno how well you’d take to the bureaucracy and the gossip and the nationalism, though. I give you two days til you ended up in jail or dead in a ditch.”

“That bad, huh? Well, at least I’d have you around to break me out of prison!” 

He scoffed at that. “Oh no, you’d be dealing with the civilised version of me, back when I didn’t actually go around beating people to death with barbed baseball bats and superheated hammers. Best I could do would be to offer the officers a nice bottle of bourbon and wait for it to blow over.”

“No more than that? Boy, what a let-down. So much for having a friend on the inside.” He groaned in his raspy voice, that sounded slightly like he ate sandpaper for three meals a day. “You don’t have any contacts you can hook me up with? Get me a sweet deal?”

“Well, Nora was a lawyer, so maybe we’d’ve been able to swing something, get you parole early perhaps, but no promises.”

“Not sure she’d want to if she knew what you and I were getting up to in the commonwealth.”

Elliott grinned at the thought. “You didn’t know her. She always liked a bit of excitement. The Chinese were lucky I got sent off to fight them instead of her; they’d have been dust in under a week.”

“I mean, that’s not really what I meant, but sure.” Hancock kicked at the dirt with his left foot.

“I know what you meant, dummy. Don’t sweat it, she woulda liked you. If anything the two of you would get on so well that you’d end up leaving me behind and become partners in crime.”

Hancock shrugged. “Eh, I still think I’d’ve liked you better though. No offence.”

“None taken. You didn’t know her.” 

He squeezed the diminutive ghoul tightly, just for a second, before standing up to regard the whole party. 

“Thanks for looking out for me, fellas. Sunshine Tidings ain’t far from here, so I say we head that way, before any more raiders get on our tail.”

They looked up at him silently. They were not dissenting, at least. He wondered what they really thought of him, after all this. Last night would be a black mark against his name, to be sure. Rumours would spread about him, that the general of the minutemen had carried his dead wife out of Cryosleep and danced with her. That he talked to dead people, that he was delusional, unstable. Dangerous. They probably thought the institute had frazzled his brain, or worse, replaced him with a synth. Well his brain did feel pretty frazzled to be honest. But evidently he wasn’t past the point of no return, not to the three of them, who were still here with him. 

“Right you are, general. You sure you’re going to be okay-?” 

The question hung in the air uncertainly. Everyone was looking at him.

 

“I’ll be fine.” Elliott nodded. “You don’t need to worry about me.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed! Chapter 2 will be up soon, possibly accompanied by a few screenshots/drawings of my own. 
> 
> As always, you can find me on tumblr at mothdads.tumblr.com and will be overjoyed at any feedback you deign to give me. Have a lovely day!


End file.
